Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Several governmental and provincial organizations have published data in different domains to the hope that such data are used and analyzed by a wide range of people, from professional statisticians to the lay public. Despite the emerging public attention on publishing open government data, the re-use of open data - from a semantic web point of view- is still in its infancy. Based on the Linked Data standard, open data should follow a 5-star development scheme and each entity in an open dataset should be discoverable. Existing provincial open data platforms in Canada, however, follow a 3-star development scheme. They publish data in raw formats without underlying precise semantics, while they are semantically related to each other. Lack of semantics in datasets leads to dataset isolation, hinders data enrichment, and causes poor search results. The long-term objective of this research program is designing a semantic web analytics platform over the Nova Scotia open data to a) achieve a 5-star development scheme for the open datasets and b) develop a query answering system. The 5-start scheme allows all the entities in an open dataset to be discoverable by the other datasets on the Web of Data. I will achieve this long¬-term objective with my HQP and through the following short¬-term objectives: a) collecting data from the Nova Scotia open data b) analyzing the datasets and their relationships c) transforming the collected data to the semantic web format by designing an ontology, and d) creating a knowledgebase and developing a semantic web search over the knowledgebase. To target each objective, HQP will be trained and supervised to acquire the knowledge of open data analytics, develop their research and professional skills within the program, and eventually implement a system that is defined by each objective. The research program is divided into four phases which include data collection, data analysis, data transformation and building a semantic web analytics application. A set of case studies (e.g., linking to the other provincial open data) will be implemented within the research program as a proof of concept. Providing a semantic web analytics platform over the Nova Scotia open data significantly impacts on the existing provincial open data in Canada, as it proposes a referenceable method that can be applied by all the open data websites. Provincial open data websites in Canada can follow the approach that will be presented in this research program, to make their data available in the semantic web format and link their datasets. Both the public sector and private companies will be highly motivated to utilize the outcome of this research program in order to search and discover new facts over the linked Nova Scotia datasets. Enriching an open data platform with internal and external datasets is an important step towards unifying all the open data in Canada.